


From The Deep

by sunhawk (sunhawkflamesprite)



Category: CSI: Miami, CSI: NY
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Fantasy, Gen, M/M, Occult, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-01
Updated: 2009-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 06:53:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/209951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunhawkflamesprite/pseuds/sunhawk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eric can't seem to shake a nightmare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From The Deep

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [BSI Series](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/3528) by Stellaluna. 



> I wrote this as an homage to the BSI-verse CSI:NY fics that stellaluna_ has written that I admire greatly, hopefully she doesn't mind me adding my impressions of that universe from the Miami side of things. An explanation of BSI-verse can be found here: http://users.livejournal.com/stellaluna_/232109.html  
> Thanks to: my betas Caedn and Alligator138, you rawk!!

Eric woke up in a cold sweat, confused in the deep blue stillness of his bedroom.  Shards of his now-shattered nightmare echoed inside his brain in an unnerving downward spiral of sound, like hearing someone's scream slowed down to a crawl and buggy with some sort of digital static.  A fast, blurred image of someone's moving arm, unmistakably violent in the way it was swinging, and then Eric's mental thread snarled and snapped, fraying into nothingness that left him drained and bewildered.

Another dream.  Two months later and they still hadn't gone away, even as his memory came back and the rest of his body grudgingly decided to come back under his control.  If anything, they were getting worse, or at least longer and more intense.  Not any more sensible though.  Not any more clear.  Still jumbled impressions, choppy camera cuts, like his brain was filled with shaky, amateur home videos.

Rubbing his neck tiredly, Eric's fingers brushed along the bottom of the scar that covered the skin just above and to the left of the base of his skull.  For a moment, he thought he felt it tingle and frowned, hoping it didn't mean a new case of nerve damage.  Thankfully, it faded quickly and Eric dropped his hand, sighing quietly before letting his legs swing over to the side of the bed.  There was no point trying to fall asleep again, so Eric got up and pulled on a pair of sweatpants before making his way to the tiny desk in his living room.  On the scratched, wooden surface, the book he had dropped, unread, still lay as it had fallen and somehow had opened to the first page in defiance to the laws of gravity.

Sighing again, Eric sat down at the lone chair beside the desk and turned on the small table lamp, leaning on one elbow and starting the reading he had promised to start more than a week ago, when Ryan had loaned him the dusty tome.

  
*~*~*

  
“You sure you’re feeling okay, Delko?  You seemed a little distracted today during-” Ryan started to ask, but Eric cut him off irritably:

“I'm fine, I feel fine, I just didn't get a good night's sleep, that's all.”

Ryan nodded, but Eric knew he wasn't going to let it go.  It was already a well-known fact that Ryan had a stubborn streak to shame a mule, but it wasn't until they had become partners on the team that Eric had learned that Ryan's stubbornness was often paired with a surprisingly strong protective nature.

Ryan continued to put away his gear into his locker without a word, but his stance was that of patient waiting.  Eric thought about ignoring him but also knew from experience that Ryan could wait all day, quietly going about his business but somehow making it clear that he was still waiting.  He was almost as bad as Calleigh, Eric thought with amusement.  Or as bad as she had been, he amended silently with a touched of sadness, trying to not dwell on what had happened to her.

“It's nothing, just been having this dream, almost like a reccurring nightmare,”  Eric said, finally relenting, though not without some testiness over the fact that a few years ago, no one would have cared a fig about anyone's dreams.  Eric wasn’t the only one to think back wistfully of the old days, before what had been previously referred to as paranormal had simply become normal.

“What, like pre-cog?”  Ryan asked, his eyebrow lifting upwards just a hair.

“No, I don't know, maybe.  Probably just ...” Eric started to suggest it was his brain still a little wonky from the headshot, but he was just as reluctant to admit weakness as he was to admit he was anything other than an unlucky everyday schmuck recruited to the Bureau.

"Don't tell H, okay?"  Eric's words, along with his emphatic tone, seemed to surprise Ryan, who paused in his labcoat unbuttoning and looked over at Eric.

"Why?  He should hear about these dreams,"  Ryan replied calmly.

" _*Dream*_ , not dreams.  I just had the one a few times and it probably means nothing."  Eric put his gun and his bio-meter away on his locker shelf with just a little more force than was necessary.

"Well, there's only one way to find out..."  Ryan trailed off, putting away his labcoat and closing his own locker.

"What way?" Eric asked impatiently when Ryan just stood there looking at him.

"You could consult the Oracle."

"Ohhh no, there's no way I am filling out that seven page request form, not for just one stupid dream,"  Eric retorted, then raised an eyebrow at Ryan's slightly guilty expression. "What?"

"You don't have to do it during work hours, if you wait until after.... I could..."  Ryan rubbed the back of his neck as he always did when he was nervous.

"You could what?"  Eric prodded, crossing his arms over his chest and looking over at Ryan.

"Um, I've been ... practicing a little...."

"You're a medium?"  Eric could feel his eyebrows rising, trying to imagine his awkward, less-than-subtle colleague in tune with such a complex piece of psitronic machinery.  Ryan winced at Eric's label.

"Not exactly... more like a latent... just lately..."  Ryan trailed off again and Eric felt like he was missing some subtle part of whatever Ryan was trying to convey.  Eric shook his head a little, a part of him stubbornly refused to try to understand the more complex aspects of the arcane side of his job.  Ironic, considering that the detectives in the agency thought the forensics team was too spooky all on its own, with Eric automatically lumped in with some of the more powerful team members.  Four years later, and he still wasn't comfortable, which was part of why he didn't really want to go have his head examined by the Oracle.  Eric was a little afraid of what it might mean, when so much had already changed in his life.

But Eric found it hard to say no to Ryan, who wasn't very good at offering to help and who Eric was trying to get along with these days.

"So what now?" Eric finally replied, in a somewhat resigned fashion.  Ryan looked both relieved and even more nervous, but he nodded and gestured that Eric lead the way out of the locker room.

~*~

They watched the current Oracle make her way slowly and unhurriedly out of the room, her movements graceful and on the edge of uncanny, just like her appearance.  Whatever they looked like before their service, the Oracles all eventually became slender and even sometimes more youthful, with doll-like features and doe eyes that saw far too much, even when away from the machines.  

With that knowledge of her enhanced awareness, both men kept their distance and tried to keep their thoughts on ongoing cases, lounging down the hallway in a way that felt embarrassingly fake.  The Oracle let the glass door close behind her and then paused, looking in their direction.  Both men tried not to break into a sweat.  With her luminous brown eyes glancing at them thoughtfully, the Oracle turned without any sign of recognition and walked in the opposite direction.  Eric exhaled in relief and, to his amusement, heard Ryan do the same.

Ryan opened the glass door and Eric followed him inside.

“Alright, you know the drill, Delko,”  Ryan called back over his shoulder.  “Shoes off, front and center.”

*~**~*

Bare feet against the cool glass, Eric gingerly stepped into the glowing gold ring that appeared on the glossy black floor and peered down at the drifting grains as they settled into the patterns and symbols that Ryan was calling up on the console.  Eric wondered which tech wizard had come up with the clever idea of the protective glass and the reservoirs of charged powders, that were carefully renewed each full and new moon.  No more worrying that a careless step or stray breeze would leave the circle incomplete and the person within vulnerable, usually lethally so.

“Should I think about the dream?” Eric asked, looking over at Ryan, who looked up from the console where he had been moving things around with his fingertip or sometimes all of his hand, the tips splayed wide.

“I thought you said you didn't remember it,” Ryan replied with a raised eyebrow.  Eric fidgeted a tiny bit within the confines of the circle.

“I don't... just a feeling... a bit of something...” He trailed off, oddly embarrassed.

“Don't worry about it, this baby is supposed to be the strongest on this side of the pond, it should be able to search it out all on its own.” Ryan gave him a look meant to be reassuring, then went back to putting the last few commands in place, his brow once again creased in concentration.  Eric watched with interest as Ryan moved with quick efficiency, his hands moving over the touch screen to grab and drag, his palms moving outward in a widening gesture, opening glowing boxes and closing them again.  He only hesitated twice, peering down at the ordered sets of pictograms, muttering to himself as if repeating something memorized.

Eric turned to face the floor-to-ceiling screen, watching as the last set of symbols Ryan was bringing up aligned themselves neatly in glowing gold letters before fading.  The floor began to hum and then a gleaming golden curtain of sparkling motes rose around Eric, meeting in a dome shape over his head before disappearing.

“That should do it,” Ryan stated, tapping one last time on the console before turning towards the huge screen.  The black surface slowly lit up, moving from a dark indigo blue to a multi-coloured, shifting abstract of colour.  Numbers scrolled past at the left-hand side, some meaningless and others looking like points of latitude and longitude, and Eric couldn't identify the digitalized sounds spilling from the surround-sound speakers, except as fluting bleeps and faint whirring.

Slowly, the picture on the screen came in to focus:

An alleyway in a city, the brief symphony of car horns and sirens, but quiet otherwise.  A woman walked purposefully through, heels echoing on the wet concrete, passing quickly under a dusky yellow light that illuminated her high, stark cheekbones and made brassy the cascade of curls.  A cat followed behind her, silently padding as cats do, with blue-grey fur like tempered steel and eyes like copper coins, glowing in the dark.   The screen's perspective shifted to watch them from behind and for a moment, the cat and the lady seemed to walk in sync.

“A witch?”  Eric hazarded, thinking the cat her familiar.  But she didn't seem aware of the cat and she sported none of the symbols that most witches were so fond of, not even wearing a single silver pentagram or piece of red coral.

“Not that smart to walk dark alleys...” Ryan started to comment, then trailed off when she reacted to the loud, startlingly appearance of a tumbling popcan by turning with trained reflexes and a well-aimed service pistol, the gun appearing like a magician's conjuration.

“A cop?”  Eric tried again, but that didn't feel right either.

The scene faded to black and then rebrightened with the tall woman in a large, dirty room, like a warehouse, moving again with that predatory grace, but this time obscured by shifting tides of mist.  She looked like she was hunting for something, gun held up in readiness, alert and moving very quietly. There was a crash out of their line of sight, and Eric and Ryan watched her turn and shout, the words drowned out by a roar, a blur of black and glowing green.  Her shots blossomed white light in the gloom, her face flashing tense and pale in the brief illumination. She scrambled backwards as something with long fur and snarling jaws advanced, only really visible as an indistinct, lupine shadow with glowing sickly-green eyes.

The scene blurred, stretched out; time pooled around like taffy, in that strange way that dreams do.  As Ryan and Eric stared with growing tension, flashes of the woman flickered by: her panicked shout and gesture; violet arrow-headed lines and hooked symbols stabbing outwards; her clutching an arm as a dark river of blood ran over her clenched fingers; a man in blue and black running towards her while another man in earth tones stormed after a trail of scorched fur, his rifle out in front of him, the light from the top-mounted sight bouncing slightly as his steps pounded the concrete floor.

The last ragged set of impressions was of lonely, silvered eyes, the woman's face fearful as she stared at something on her palm, and the distinct sensation of charged air, slowing intensifying until Eric felt the hairs on his arm rising.  He wondered for a moment if his ears were going to pop, but then he heard Ryan make an odd sound, a soft gulping somewhere between pained and a struggle for breath.

Eric turned to look over at Ryan and stared for a moment at the strange sight of his coworker:  Ryan stood with his hands clenching the edge of the table, his eyes glowed an electric blue that glinted with silver like arctic ice, his skin took on cyan highlights from the console's swirling symbols and his hair was gently drifting in defiance of gravity, moving in fluid spikes as if he was underwater.   His gaze caught Eric's and the strength of Ryan's stare nearly flattened Eric where he stood; in part from channeling something bigger and infinitely inhuman and in part from the nearly-lost gleam of panic that was Ryan himself caught under the onslaught of arcane power.

“S h e   m o v e s  ....  t h e   t r i n i t y   d r a w s   t i g h t e r ....  h e   w i l l   b e   l o s t   w i t h o u t   t h e  c h a l i c e ...”  Ryan's lips moved but it was not his voice that spoke; it was a sound that dwarfed them both, a low tone of cold wind and granite.  Eric's skin crawled at the sight of such raw, undisguised power.

“Ryan!” he shouted, lifting his hand and blindly hitting the invisible wall around him.  A sound filled the room, deep like the belling of immense leviathans from the farthest depths of the ocean, and Eric could almost feel the crushing pressure of those sunless depths pushing him down, pushing Ryan down.

“RYAN!!”  Eric yelled again, putting his shoulder against that unseen barrier, bouncing off and throwing his arms wide in a pointless attempt to find a gap or weak point.  His elbow struck the circle's edge and there was a sudden flash of hot orange light; a sizzling, burning sensation along his skin.  As the barrier evaporated, the shocking scent of salt filled Eric's nostrils, and Ryan's eyes rolled back into his head, as he fell forward like a puppet with its strings cut.

There was no conscious decision to try to catch Ryan, the momentum from his struggle to get free carried Eric into a collision course with the slumping figure.  That forward motion carried them further still, rolling until they hit the far wall of the oracle room. Eric ended up tumbling upright somehow and the small of his back stuck the black, painted surface, forcing a pained grunt out of him.  

Eric sat stunned for a moment, seeing stars and after-images, then he focused his attention outward and found Ryan half in his lap, eyes closed and seemingly unconscious.  Eric checked for a pulse on the side of Ryan's throat, noting how fragile Ryan's skin felt under his fingertips, yet Ryan lay heavy on his legs, a reassuring weight of tendon and muscle.  Thankfully, Ryan's pulse was strong, but then Eric had the fleeting sensation of terror and ecstasy, which only stopped when Eric jerked his fingers away from Ryan's skin.  Eric stared at Ryan, unsure how or why that exchange had just happened, remembering the sight of Ryan trapped within himself, thinking of his own struggle with the dreams.  

Sighing, Eric let it go for the moment and turned his attention to his elbow, which he had belatedly noticed was throbbing hotly.  Eric twisted his arm and peered down, watching a thin tendril of smoke, or perhaps steam, curl away from where Eric's tattoo of a triangle inset with the horned symbol of mercury lay on his forearm.   The skin around the dark blue lines was red but not burned, Eric noted with relief, and then Ryan groaned and distracted Eric from further contemplation.

Ryan's eyelids fluttered for a moment, and then he opened his eyes, Eric noted with even more relief that they were no longer that uncanny ice blue, but instead a normal greeny hazel, cool and dark in the dimness of the oracle room.  Ryan looked up at Eric for a moment, then blinked and tilted his head, trying to orient himself but not really moving to get up.

“Do I want to know how we got over here?”  Ryan asked, meeting Eric's eyes again.

“Do you remember what just happened?”  Eric replied, studying Ryan's face and thus catching  the brief flashes of conflicting emotion that flickered over Ryan's features

“Some of it..” Ryan admitted, though he plainly looked like he wanted to deny that anything had occurred at all, let alone that he'd lost control of something they both didn't really understand.

“Well, at least we got something from inside my head, right?”  Eric tried to sound upbeat and  
casual.  Ryan groaned again as he slowly levered himself off of Eric's legs, and Eric wasn't sure whether he was groaning from soreness or amusement.

“Let's get out of here before someone sees us and figures out we did something stupid,”  Ryan replied, while he dusted off his jeans.  “I've had enough work for one day, let's get a drink.”

Left unspoken was the fact that both men felt sorely in need of one.

***

  
Eric finally found the chapter he had been looking for and slowly turned the browned pages, which hissed faintly as they slid against each other.  Old illuminated drawings filled every few pages, their dark umber lines deep and delicate by turns, as Eric skimmed over the paragraphs.  A few entries caught his eye, with the mention of oceans or fog, but then he came across a page that stopped his page-turning, and Eric murmured the name out loud, trying it out:

“Odin.”

There was no mention of the sea or sea monsters, but there was mention of storms and Eric remembered the sound of that strange voice, like a bleak mountain boulder.  Eric sat and stared at the image etched in the entry, of a dark-robed man with a long-brimmed hat and staff, flanked by two ravens and two wolves.  He didn't know why he felt certain he had found the right page, no more than he was sure why he knew to look in the chapter about old gods and spirits.  It didn't make any logical sense, as a way to explain his dreams.

What did old gods have to do with him?  Or Ryan?

  
-fin-  
1.7.09


End file.
